The commercial world of the white man had caught the Eskimos in its mesh, destroying their self-sufficiency and independence, and made them economically its slaves. Only in one respect did it benefit them: it lessened the danger of those unpredictable famines which had overtaken them every ten or fifteen years, bringing suffering and death to young and old without distinction.
—DIAMOND JENNESS, The People of the Twilight
AFTER TWO YEARS OF MINIMUM-SECURITY IMPRISONMENT at Fort Resolution and some time spent working as guides for the Royal North West Mounted Police, Sinnisiak and Uluksuk were released on May 15, 1919, and eventually returned to their home territory. They were told, in formal legal language, that “the proceedings in the present case have served to inform them of their responsibilities, and that they are solemnly charged with their duty to serve God and honour the King and carefull to observe his laws.”1
Despite the warnings, both Sinnisiak and Uluksuk apparently became shiftless. In 1924, Uluksuk reportedly traded one of his sons to Sinnisiak for a .22-caliber rifle, then took the boy back and disappeared. Sinnisiak appealed to white police officers to intervene in the dispute. Before a patrol could find him, Uluksuk got into a quarrel with a man named Ikayena, who had shot one of Uluksuk’s dogs. One night, Uluksuk sat outside Ikayena’s tent while a card game went on inside. When Ikayena emerged, Uluksuk threatened him with a gun, and Ikayena shot him dead. Mounted police officers traveled 135 miles to make the arrest, and journalists used the occasion to comment on the intractibility of Eskimos. “The murder of Uluksuk brings to attention the possibility that the Eskimos’ powers of perception are not developed sufficiently to understand the gentle paternalism of the white men in the matter of punishment,” one newspaper reported.
Of Sinnisiak, less is known. He may have died of tuberculosis. People still say that he and Uluksuk brought white men’s diseases like influenza back to their communities. In the eyes of some white men, Sinnisiak and Uluksuk continued to stand as models of the degenerate Eskimo. In July 1921, a police officer named Doak was sent out to investigate another Eskimo murder. At Fort Norman, the white explorer D’Arcy Arden told Doak to be careful. “Those Huskies are getting too cocky altogether for my liking and you would be taking a good chance of having your liver eaten,” Arden said. “Look at what they did to the two priests, LeRoux and Rouvière, a few years ago. They are treacherous. Another stunt like that last jury pulled off and it won’t be safe for a white man to enter Coronation Gulf.”
Doak took a thousand-mile boat trip from Herschel Island east to Tree River, where he met and shared a meal with Sinnisiak. On the Kent Peninsula, Doak arrested two men, Aligoomiak and Tatamagana. Soon afterward, while under loose detention, Aligoomiak angered Doak by improperly softening his boots, then by spilling a pail of water. Doak shouted at him. Aligoomiak intended to shoot Doak in the leg to punish him for his sharp words. When the shot went high and Doak died, Aligoomiak decided to kill Doak’s companion, a white trader named Otto Binder, as well. Once again, the Mounties were called in, and once again they found their men. This time, the trial was held in the north country: judge, prosecutor, defense attorney, and court clerk were all shipped two thousand miles north to a makeshift courtroom at Herschel Island. So was a hang-man. The court scoured the countryside to find white jurors who did not know the deceased. In the end, both Aligoomiak and Tatamagana were convicted and sentenced to death. On February 1, 1924, they were hanged. Some in the Catholic Church felt that the severity of the punishment, compared to what had happened to Sinnisiak and Uluksuk, showed a two-tiered system of justice. The legal system did one thing for people convicted of killing Protestants and something else for those who killed Catholics. Some months later, Aligoomiak’s elderly father left his community for a remote igloo. He strung a line between a harpoon and his igloo, and hanged himself.2
By 1930, Sinnisiak too was dead, though how he died is not known.
SOON AFTER the trials in Edmonton and Calgary, C. C. McCaul offered some ideas for fixing the north country—ideas that did not include missionaries. “I think that the Government ought to send a small expedition of education (not religion) to these people, accompanied, I would suggest, by no missionaries of any denomination whatever,” he wrote. What was needed most of all was a full web of police barracks and courts to handle the inevitable increase in Eskimo crime. The Royal North West Mounted Police should set up a post with twenty officers at Fort Resolution, on Great Slave Lake, with another outpost at Fort Confidence, on Great Bear Lake, he proposed. The justice ministry should set up a central magistrate at Fort Resolution, with all the powers of a Supreme Court judge and the same salary ($10,000, plus a liberal travel budget) that was paid to judges in the Yukon. They should be promised a generous pension, since “no educated gentleman could be expected to ostracise himself from civilization and endure the hardships necessarily incident to the life and travel in this country for a longer period.”
This increase in peace officers “would be able, probably, to keep the peace between the Great Bear Lake Indians and the Eskimos, between whom there is an ancestral feud,” McCaul wrote. “They would also, of course, add greatly to, if not absolutely secure, the safety of all white men going to the Coppermine country. The magistrate would make it his duty to inculcate the general principles of both criminal and civil law among the natives, including the Eskimos, and could, I think, have an annual ‘pow-wow’ with them for this purpose. Some summer it would be a good plan, and an exceedingly interesting and not too rigorous or uncomfortable trip, for the Governor General and suite to visit these people, with an impressive escort of Royal North West Mounted Police.”3
Sure enough, the reconfigured Royal Canadian Mounted Police saw its workload jump dramatically in the 1920s. Its feats of investigation became such a part of Canada’s folklore that tales of wilderness crimes became standard yarns around the national campfire. Some were true, some were not, but all seemed to reflect something about the country’s sense of itself. A story about wolves attacking a trapper in northern Ontario was uncovered as a fabrication when officers discovered photographs of animals that had been killed and arranged into fierce poses. Equally titillating, and equally untrue, was a rumor that a family of starving Eskimos living north of Saskatchewan had killed and eaten a group of Indians.4
Other legends were true. Three years after the Doak case, the police were called to investigate yet another missing white man: John Hornby. In June 1927, after a difficult winter spent northeast of Great Slave Lake, Hornby and two companions had starved to death. When Mounties arrived at the cabin some months later, they discovered two corpses lying outside and a third inside. The cabin’s floorboards and bunks had been ripped up for firewood. A small tin trunk full of photographic equipment was flooded with water. The police officers found diaries and farewell notes. “We have suffered terrible and awful hardships,” Hornby had written his cousin Margaret. In a rotten leather case, police also found a draft of a book Hornby had been writing. He had titled it “In the Land of Feast or Famine.” 5
DESPITE THEIR EARLY difficulties in reaching Eskimo communities, and disregarding McCaul’s advice, missionaries did in fact continue to push northward. In 1916, not long after the Canadian Arctic Expedition and Denny LaNauze’s patrol left Bernard Harbor, the Hudson’s Bay Company established a trading post on the abandoned site. The Anglican Reverend Herbert Girling set up an outpost right next to it. The anthropologist Diamond Jenness considered Girling “a man of considerable culture and attainments, with large views and larger sympathies.” Girling’s “strong winning personality gained him a great influence over all the natives among whom he worked.” There was one strange and terrifying moment early on in Girling’s tenure. As he was helping unload a supply boat, a fuel tank exploded and ignited a fire that burned the boat to the hull. Though no one was killed, virtually all the supplies were lost. Girling would spend four years among the Copper Eskimos before dying of pneumonia in February 1920, at the age of thirty. 6
That same year, Father Frapsauce, the Catholic priest who replaced Fathers Rouvière and LeRoux in the Far North, asked Bishop Gabriel Breynat to authorize resumption of the Eskimo mission. Since the verdict in the Calgary trial, Frapsauce said, he had had the chance to mix with the Eskimos, and found them “a naturally cheerful people; you never find one gloomy.” The trouble was, Frapsauce said, “their morals are atrocious. They abandon all children born in the summer. They steal and lie and are utterly dissolute. There is a certain amount of good material there, and a few individuals whose habitual conduct is good; that of most of them, however, is simply deplorable. They are all addicted to witchcraft.” A year later, Father Frapsauce fell through the ice on Great Bear Lake and drowned. His body was not recovered for months.7
Anglicans initially built St. Andrews Church in Bernard Harbor in 1915, but they moved it to the town of Coppermine, where the river dumps into Coronation Gulf, in 1929, soon after the Hudson’s Bay Company built its outpost there. Catholics built their own church, Our Lady of the Light, right down the road. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police set up a post three years later.
In the spring of 1929, Breynat reported that he could fly the five hundred miles from Fort McMurray, north of Edmonton, all the way to Fort Simpson, on the Mackenzie River, in just ninety minutes. The trip used to take five days by dogsled. That same year, he traveled to the mouth of the Coppermine. There, in a “wretched little hut,” Breynat and Father Pierre Fallaize, who’d replaced Father Frapsauce, gave the first mass ever celebrated on the Arctic coast. Their congregation consisted of a single Eskimo family. A week later Breynat performed his first Eskimo marriage. A month after this, Breynat lost another priest, Father Lecuyer, who drowned on the Arctic Red River. “It was a trial that gave me food for serious reflection,” Breynat wrote. “We had reached the limit of our available strength. It was impossible to develop, or even hold our own, with a personnel so reduced as ours.”
Breynat set off for Rome in 1930, to plead the case for more personnel with Pope Pius XI himself. The pope told Breynat that the first book he had ever read as a youth had been an account of the search for the Northwest Passage. He gave Breynat his full support and threw in $10,000 to help pay for a new mission boat. In August 1931, Breynat once again traveled to the coast, hoping to see the two crosses Corporals Wight and Withers had erected as a memorial to Fathers Rouvière and LeRoux. He took a canoe to Bloody Falls with Father Duchaussois and Patsy Klengenberg. Duchaussois kept pressing Patsy for details, pointing out “how improbable it was that desire to get hold of the carbine should have been the only motive for the double murder, when the victims had won the esteem and affection of so many of the Eskimos.” Finally, Patsy responded. “You should know, Father, that among the Eskimos nothing so important ever happens without the medicine men having something to do with it.”
Precisely what Patsy meant by this, Breynat did not fully tease out. Indeed, exactly what happened during those terrible moments near Bloody Falls remained a source of mystery for all who knew the Eskimos and the priests. That the priests had become unpredictable was beyond dispute, and unpredictability in the Arctic always created fear. In addition to being dangerously close to starvation, Fathers Rouvière and LeRoux had been physically weakened by injury and illness. Their backs to the Arctic coast, they had faced retreating over hundreds of miles of a bewildering landscape that for a century had swallowed explorers who possessed far more wilderness skills than they. Winter, the season of darkness and death, was on its way. The priests had no food, no shelter, and no real talent in securing either. In every way, their circumstances, even before Sinnisiak and Uluksuk had appeared, had become catastrophic. To the Eskimos, these facts alone suggested that the priests were perilously close to the edge. Would the priests have survived their journey back to their cabin on their own? It is hard to know. It does not seem likely.
Father Rouvière had always seemed a gentle man, but Uluksuk claimed that it had been Rouvière who had handed LeRoux the rifle. Then, just as impulsively, Rouvière had apparently changed his mind, and begun throwing the priests’ cartridges in the river. This, to Sinnisiak and Uluksuk, must have been the clearest evidence of all that the priests had become unhinged. Rifle cartridges, even for skilled hunters, were precious beyond description. For the priests, they represented a last flicker of hope. With the cartridges washed downriver, the priests would have had no way of securing food for a journey that, given their inexperience and poor navigational skills, would have taken them many, many days.
The fact that Sinnisiak had to shoot Father Rouvière in the back seems clear evidence that Rouvière, in the end, refused violence. Father LeRoux, for his part, had always seemed petulant, even aggressive; that LeRoux, especially in such a state of desperation, would push a moment to its violent conclusion, would have surprised no one who had crossed his path in the Barren Lands.
Bishop Breynat, of course, reached his own conclusions. Patsy’s comments about the medicine men only served “to strengthen our conviction that our missionaries were killed out of hatred of our holy religion, whose teaching threatened to destroy the domination, hitherto undisputed, exercised by these men of darkness, the sorcerers. If only we could discover soon the formal proof, which would allow the Church to bestow the palm and halo of martyrs on our beloved dead!”8
In August 1934, Father Pierre Fallaize made his own pilgrimage to find the memorial, now nearly two decades old. It was difficult to locate, partially because information about its emplacement was inexact. But Father Pierre Fallaize was determined. The site had become a symbol of the church’s will to establish itself in the north country. Another priest hoped that one day, “all the Eskimos will pray there, remembering with gratitude those who laid down their lives for them.”9
After making his way to the Arctic Ocean and traveling three hundred miles by boat from the Catholic mission base at Letty Harbor, Father Fallaize and three other priests, along with “a little Eskimo” named Peter Natit, took a motorboat twelve miles up the Coppermine to Bloody Falls, where they exited the boat and, in sealskin boots, climbed a steep bank. They then hiked over muddy, patchy ground, made slippery by the frozen subsoil that lay beneath. They stumbled over “women’s heads,” creeping plants, lichen, moss, and the tundra that extended over virtually the whole region. Since no one knew exactly where the memorial was, the small group took a number of wrong turns, scattering about as they made their way upstream. Finally, arriving at a ravine sometime in the afternoon, one of the priests called out. There, on the ground before him, lay a muddy, weather-beaten cross, about five feet in length, with a brief inscription: “In memory of the RR Fathers ROUVIÈRE and LEROUX, OMI. Killed by the Eskimos Nov. 1913. On a trip of Exploration for the Extension of the Gospel. R.I.P.”
Behind, near the left arm of the cross, the priests noticed “the visible rents made by the claws of a powerful polar bear, no doubt the same animal which had leant against the cross and knocked it down.” The priests stood the cross upright and secured it with a pile of rocks. They then knelt down to recite the De Profundis, along with a decade of the rosary, for their brothers “who had fallen victims to their apostolic zeal.” 10
PREDICTABLY, ALL OF this activity had a dramatic impact on traditional customs. Suddenly, Eskimos were leaving sealing grounds two months earlier than previously, devoting themselves instead to fox trapping. In the winter of 1919, an entire population from southeast Victoria Island migrated to the Kent Peninsula, where a white trader had accumulated a large store of blubber for fuel. Hardly a hunting bow remained in the country, Diamond Jenness wrote. Nearly every man had a rifle. The destruction of the caribou was proceeding so rapidly that within ten years, scarcely one would be left in the vicinity of Coronation Gulf. The old copper culture had given way to iron; old dress was giving way to Western dress. Tuberculosis was beginning to take a toll that would ravage the Arctic for decades. By the mid-1930s, gold mines were being discovered near Great Bear Lake, and outfitters’ businesses in the town of Yellowknife, on Great Slave Lake, began booming. American oil and mining companies began pouring into the Barren Lands, building roads and airfields.
The changes, of course, only broadened what had been going on in the north country for decades. In the hundred years between 1769 and 1868, London auctions had sold phenomenal quantities of furs and skins for the Hudson’s Bay Company: 891,091 fox, 1,052,051 lynx, 68,694 wolverine, 288,016 bear, 467,549 wolf, 1,507,240 mink, 94,326 swan, 275,032 badger, 4,708,702 beaver, and 1,240,511 marten. Two contemporary companies, the North West Company and the Canada Company, also traded furs in comparable numbers. There are no figures for the number of native people in the region who perished because of diphtheria, smallpox, tuberculosis, poliomyelitis, and other diseases, but historians say that the figure may be as high as 90 percent. Smallpox carried off two thousand of the Greenland Eskimos in 1734 and 1735, and destroyed many of the Labrador natives as well.11
To Diamond Jenness, a similar fate awaited the central Arctic. In the late nineteenth century, it was estimated that the Eskimo population of the Mackenzie River delta numbered two thousand; by 1913 it was reduced to barely five hundred, the majority of the natives having died of measles. The influenza pandemic of 1918 took a terrible toll among the Eskimos of northern Alaska, nearly wiping out entire settlements. Among the Copper Eskimos, there had been a sharp rise in deaths from an influenza epidemic in 1912–13, immediately after the first encounter with Stefansson and the priests. The Oblate priest Father Fallaize, working Rouvière and LeRoux’s territory in the Far North, reported that tuberculosis, meningitis, and other white men’s diseases had begun to tear through the Eskimo population. A group of seventy-five people that Fallaize visited in 1924 was reduced by thirty-four in just six years. By the 1950s, the settlement at the mouth of the Coppermine had only seven families in permanent residence, but the ebb and flow of more migrant groups enabled it to support both an Anglican and a Catholic church. Both missions maintained health clinics, but it is hard to miss a certain irony in this. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, these clinics handled terrible outbreaks of measles, German measles, and Asian flu, all brought in by white visitors.
“The journey of the two French missionaries to the mouth of the Coppermine river in 1913 must have opened the eyes of the Eskimos to difficulties under which the majority of white men labor when they try to cope with Arctic conditions of life and travel,” Jenness wrote. “For many different reasons, therefore, the natives conceived a certain amount of contempt for white men, contempt that was qualified only by a desire to gain some of their most valued possessions, their knives and axes and particularly their rifles and ammunition.”12
“Even while we said our farewells,” Jenness wrote,
the traders were all heading eastward to the new land where beautiful fox skins were valueless and a fortune could be gained in a night. White men have invaded it from every quarter, and the twilight of ignorance and superstition is yielding to the dawn of great knowledge. Bows and arrows have passed with other weapons into the darkness of the past, and a new mechanical age has brought magazine rifles, shotguns, steel traps, and even gasoline engines. The caribou are passing with the bows and arrows; of all the herds that once crossed the narrow strait to Victoria Island hardly one now reaches the Arctic shore. “Furs, furs, more furs,” is the white man’s cry. “Without furs there is no salvation, no ammunition to shoot the scattered game and satify your hungry children.” The tribal bands where each man toiled for all and shared his food in common are resolving into their constituent families, and every family vies with the rest in the race for wealth and worldly prosperity.
Whither will it all lead? Fifty years ago the cyclone swept over the Eskimos of the Mackenzie River delta, and of its two thousand inhabitants a scant two hundred survive. Fifty years earlier it struck Baffin Island with similar result. Will history, fifty years hence, record the same fate for this twilight land where two years ago we carried on our mission? Were we the harbingers of a brighter dawn, or only messengers of ill-omen, portending disaster?”13
EIGHTY-NINE YEARS after the murder of Fathers Rouvière and LeRoux, I flew in to the tiny outpost of Kugluktuk, the village that had for several generations been known as Coppermine, now renamed with an Inuit word that means “Where the Waters Fall.” Even as our First Air jet passed over the borderless country that lies between Great Slave Lake and the Arctic Ocean, I was aware that my own journey was just another in a long series of expeditions taken by inhabitants of more southern climes who can never quite shake a fascination with the Far North. My interest in the murder and its aftermath had little to do with the grim details of the crime or the dramatic peculiarities of the trial that followed, though in time both events would come to intrigue me for their own reasons. What had drawn me north was a line of inquiry I find preoccupying like few others: the relationships that human beings develop with the land on which they choose to live. Landscapes, particularly harsh landscapes, operate on human history like the hand of a novelist, pressuring people to act and react in ways that illuminate their character.
To my mind, the lives and deaths of the two priests was a story full of moral ambiguity. Their deaths, according to white missionaries, police officers, and lawyers, were the result of criminal Eskimo behavior. But their deaths were also intricately tied up in the distinctly nonmoral facts of Arctic life: cold, hunger, and fear. Their deaths reflected the sharp and uncompromising differences between European and native notions of wisdom. One was based on Western principles of sanctity and sin, on following codes of conduct that had first arisen in a place whose most striking physical attributes were heat and sand and organized agriculture. The other was based on the physical experience of living in a place that demanded absolute discernment simply to survive from one day to the next. The Eskimos did not believe they had come to the Arctic across the Bering Straits. They had arisen straight from their land. Among the Eskimos, there were no leaders. There were experts. Hunters. Fishermen. Bootmakers. Shamans. Eskimos had a relationship with their landscape that over centuries had evolved to great subtlety. Hunters could come to a place they had last visited forty years before and remember it exactly. The landscape required understanding, not controlling. Christian missionaries asked their constituents to spend their time preparing for the world to come. The Eskimos could afford no such luxury. Bishop Breynat had once described the Canadian natives to whom he ministered as “disinherited souls.” Disinherited from what exactly? The Eskimos had been living season to season in the Arctic for five thousand years. Could it be that the priests were the real nomads, wandering in the wilderness?14
The troubling links between proselytizing religion, commerce, and justice that have become such an emblem of the last two hundred years seemed perfectly captured in this little story of life and death in a very remote place. To many of the first whites in the Arctic, the Eskimos were just another in a long line of native people to be poked, prodded, and, in some cases, brought back for museum display. One young girl, apparently kidnapped by whalers hoping to sell her as a slave in the Caribbean, ended up in France and was given the name Mademoiselle le Blanc. She amazed the French with her running speed; reportedly, she ran slightly sideways, like a wolf. A small party of Eskimos brought back to the United States by Admiral Robert Peary in 1897 quickly sickened and died from bacterial infections for which they had no immune defense. Their flesh was stripped from their bodies, and their skeletons, articulated with wire, were displayed in the American Museum of Natural History.15
Exploring a moment in history in which two remarkably different cultures violently intersected also seemed an opportunity for me to understand some basic cultural impulses. The looking glass that colonial powers hold up to native people always turns out to be more mirror than lens. For Europeans, Francis Spufford writes, “studying the Inuit was like rereading the very first pages of a long, long novel—whose plot the Victorians thought they knew, because they thought that they themselves lived its last pages. Everything that they may become, that they will become, waits to be revealed. In the Inuit the Victorians glimpsed the primitive, the lumpishly original forms of human making and doing.”16
For Catholic missionaries, of course, the stunning challenge of converting Eskimos seemed heroic, and if a priest died in the act, well, he fell into a long and honorable line. “The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians,” one missionary wrote, quoting Tertullian from a time “when the newborn Church was bled every day in the arenas of the pagan Roman emporers.” 17
WHAT I DISCOVERED in Kugluktuk in the summer of 2002 was both irrelevant to and utterly bound up with the story you have just read. The town celebrated the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement Act and the Nunavut Act in 1993, marking the handover of vast amounts of Arctic territory to its original inhabitants. Yet to my eyes there was also a peculiar and unmistakable misery. Suicide continues to be a curse, particularly among the young. When I asked a local what a prefab house was doing rotting down by the beach—not fifty yards from my campsite—he said the townspeople had dragged it there after the home owner, in a fit of jealous rage, had killed his wife, all but one of his children, and himself inside it. A young woman I met, the wife of the newly arrived Pentecostal minister, seemed overwhelmed by her new home. “There has been so much death here,” she said.
The twin demons of North American native people, alcoholism and diabetes, were also in full bloom and seemed, like all the town’s troubles, somehow more despairing for the unimaginable remoteness of the place itself. Though the town was officially “dry,” liquor fetched $300 a bottle on the black market, and was widely consumed. The current Anglican minister, Malcolm Palmer, had had to stop storing altar wine in his home because people kept breaking in to steal it. One of his predecessors, Bishop John Sperry, considers Kugluktuk to be suffering from “urbanization,” an astonishing—but accurate—way to think about a tiny town whose nearest neighbor is hundreds of miles away. Kugluktuk now has all the problems of big cities: a high rate of unemployment; AIDS; cancer; domestic violence; drug abuse; pollution (mostly the result of nuclear fallout and the aerial disposal of PCBs, which are now showing up in the fat cells of caribou and seals); and global warming, which is already causing changes in both seasonal ice melts and caribou migration patterns. “These days, the clergy may not have to pull teeth or deliver babies,” Sperry writes, “but almost daily, their ministry involves counselling people suffering from marriage breakdowns, spousal, elder, or child abuse, or chronic depression. They may need to attend court sessions, talk to parents about delinquent children, or deal with suicide attempts.” 18
It’s not that Kugluktuk is hard to get to; in this era of regular, safe air travel, quite the opposite is true. Getting to Kugluktuk today requires a ninety-minute plane ride from Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, which is itself a ninety-minute trip north from Edmonton. Yet the place feels profoundly separate from the rest of the world. A giant container ship arrives once a year, as it has for decades, to disgorge everything from fuel oil to prefabricated housing materials to snowmobiles and children’s bicycles. In a local supermarket, you can buy a wolf pelt for $750, or a pineapple for $14. People live in prefab houses that rent for $35 Canadian a month. Trucks deliver fresh water to every house in town every two days. Teenagers drive around on four-wheel ATVs. Most elders in the town are Christian. Malcolm Palmer conducts every part of his Anglican church services in the local dialect, except for the sermon, which he reads in English. During the service I attended, people sang “Onward, Christian Soliders” in Inuinnaqtun. It seemed an oddly appropriate song, given the battles Catholics and Protestants had been waging to establish themselves in the region. In Kugluktuk, the Catholic church has been closed for years, but a new Pentecostal church was just getting started. If they chose different religions, people from the same families had to be buried in separate cemeteries.
But traditional life is not that long gone. Sitting around a plywood table in the Kugluktuk Chamber of Commerce, I spoke with a number of older people who had lived in igloos and caribou-skin tents until 1965. People still go “out on the land” during the warmer weather, disappearing to remote hunting and fishing cabins for months at a time. They don’t need maps or compasses to find their way. Aimee Ahegona, an elderly man whose grandparents had once taken Diamond Jenness into their tent, told me how he had killed a polar bear when he was just fifteen years old. Peter Kamingoak, who had served as a guide for Anglican bishop John Sperry, said snowmobiles were useful, but usually burned out after a year of hard use. Dog teams were still considered far more durable.
When I visited, everyone I spoke to had watched the Twin Towers burning on CNN, and had feelings of deep sympathy for Americans. Yet when I tried to explain where New York City was, even pointing to it on a map in one family’s house, the distance from Kugluktuk to Manhattan seemed interplanetary. Imagining life and death at Ground Zero seemed no more possible from the shores of Coronation Gulf than imagining life in Kugluktuk had been from the banks of the Hudson River. I thought of the last hundred years, and the degree to which Western culture had, and had not, managed to envelop the people of Coronation Gulf. And I thought of what Denny LaNauze had written, soon after the epic journey he had taken to bring Sinnisiak and Uluksuk to justice in Edmonton.
“White trappers and traders are expected also to enter Coronation Gulf this summer, and as the natives are only too anxious to learn white man’s ways and habits, the advent of civililzation amongst them will not tend to their betterment,” LaNauze had noted. “Game will in course of time grow scarcer with the advent of a large supply of arms and ammunition, and the people will begin to wear white man’s clothes in preference to their own sensible deer skin clothing, which cannot be excelled. Should any epidemic ever strike these people, no doubt many deaths would result, for the people usually live in large communities. Indeed, to us who have had the good fortune to see these people live their strenuous, healthy existence on the Arctic coast, we cannot wish them better fortune than to hope that civilization may ever be kept at arms’ length from them.”19